Category Archives: Democratic Super-Delegates

Well, team, tomorrow is primary day in Pennsylvania. As you may have noticed, some of my projects here did not quite ripen. Work, fishing, and volunteering for Admiral Steve Kantrowitz, who is running for PA Senate 19, have intervened.

There’s nothing in this post for voters in the Dem. primary. Your vote matters, and if you’ve been paying attention there’s not much I can tell you about each candidate. I could tell you about what PA’s superdelegates are doing, but that shouldn’t be part of your equation.

As for those casting a meaningless PA presidential primary ballot, my recommendation is this: Remember, top of the ballot is legally meaningless, and the state GOP likes it that way. Down the ballot you will vote for delegates to the convention, who will cast a vote for your district in St. Paul.

If you live in my district, vote for Jim McHale. If you have the opportunity to vote for additional people, leave it blank. Generally, avoid most of the people pledged to Ron Paul, although God bless them for running and absolutely vote for them if you dig Dr. Paul. If you don’t, though, go to this page, also look at the GOP sample ballot you can get at your polling place, and vote for a person who is not endorsed by the party, and is not a Ron Paul supporter.

In my research I have determined it is those people who are most likely to have your district’s best interests at heart. As a group, the greatest fault of those people is they are running mostly because they think it would be fun to be a delegate at the convention. That’s their greatest fault. How we could go wrong with a delegation like that, I don’t know. Pass the bottle, and move to close!

The take away point from all this is what? That when it comes to electing the president of the United States, Republicans have to do lots of research and attempt to guess who might best reflect their values by proxy. If you wanted to design a system concentrating power and influence in the hands of people with roles the public doesn’t understand, this is it.

Bob Casey, you may or may not know, has not met an issue or controversy on which he can avoid fleeing, lest he reveal his characteristically equivocating and vapid core.

So after insisting he would avoid endorsing a presidential candidate, he changed his mind. And rather than endorse the candidate the large majority of his constituents tends to prefer, he decided to boldly get behind the national front-runner, apparently hoping to curry favor with St. Barack and lessen Clinton’s eventual victory in Pennsylvania

Of course, the percentage of people who really care about Bob Casey’s opinion is only marginally higher than the percentage of people– like me– who think much more highly of McCain because Phil Gramm is a close adviser.

The page on this site tracking PA’s superdelegates has some updates informed by Josh’s ruminatin’ here. No new commitments, just noting a few leans.

Josh’s post is especially amusing, as he feigns confusion over Sen. Casey’s tentativeness is supporting a candidate. What? Casey is unable to boldly articulate an opinion on something? Why, that’s as rare as the Phillies having a mediocre April!

Clouds of pixels and barrels of ink are emitted on speculation as to how democrat superdelegates will vote, and what criteria they will use to inform that vote.

We hear from them that “electability” is important. What most of those superdelegates mean to do when they cast this line of thought is have the listeners own mind catch upon Ms. Clinton’s fairly impressive negatives. If I were a superdelegate disposed to support Obama, though, I would probably stop this justification.

Look at the following poll data is three key swing states both parties covet in the general election. Who do you think is more electable amongst the two democrat candidates for president?

Hillary has notched another PA superdelegate: US Rep. John Murtha. This should burnish her anti-Iraq War bona fides some.

Seems to me with Rev. Wright thing is not going to blow over easily for St. Barack. Perhaps a superdelegate-enabled win for her is not beyond the pale. I mean, there are lots of folks unsurprised by Wright’s hyperventilating. When I worked downtown there would be a group of African American religious nuts outside suburban station with a P/A every Friday, when the weather was warm, yelling pretty much the exact same stuff to passing commuters who would ignore them the same way they ignore panhandlers.

But all those blue-collar union types in the Democratic party surely have a problem with that type of rhetoric. Especially since part of Obama’s appeal is that he was supposed to get us past that sort of thing.

Democratic superdelegates will decide the nomination. Furthermore, as noted here, they don’t generally see their role as simply validating whoever has the lead in pledged delegates.

That said, according this piece on Bloomberg.com [ht K-Lo in the Corner] recent superdelegate momentum has been towards St. Barack. Anecdotally, it still seems electability is the main concern.

Who’s electability, though? This recent momentum for Obama seems to be mostly from superdelegates that are also pols seeking votes. Importantly, it seems to be from pols seeking votes with constituencies that have bought into the numinous Obama’s campaign of change you can merely hope will arrive in the fullness of time endured through faith in St. Barack’s facility in immanentizing the eschaton.

So these recent superdelegates are moving towards Obama simply because they want to avoid a primary challenge. In practice, they are merely validating the pledged delegate count, which is precisely what they seem to claim they shouldn’t do.

I guess the real question is what the superdelegates who don’t hold elective office do.